A Quote by Jason Lutes

I love writing and the little filmmaking I have attempted, but comics is the means of artistic expression that feels most comfortable to me. It's also still a largely uncharted medium with enormous unrealized potential. I like finding new ways to communicate an idea or a feeling, ways that can't be duplicated in other media, so I take great pleasure in the invention and exploration that comics necessitates.
I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers, so any way people read comics is fine with me. Digital is just helping people who might not necessarily have access to comics help them; that's great.
Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.
There are some short stories in R. Crumb comics that are just wonderful and touch me in ways no other comics do.
Most comics are not truly rebellious or creatively free. Most comics, paintings, music, etc., are derivative of other, more successful works. And it's quite often that those without much rebellious spirit are the ones to imitate it. Genuine radical expression is hard to come by, but it usually crops up when money is not a motivating factor. You can take all the liberties you want when someone else's dime is not at stake. The validation is not a threat to comics. A far greater threat to the creative freedom of artists working in any medium is self-consciousness and self-censorship.
The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.
Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.
Over the last ten years, breaking into comics has changed so much. There used to be specific ways about how to do it ... and now, just like there are so many different ways people are getting exposed to comics, there's no single way that people are breaking in anymore.
Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.
I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers.
I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.
I was a voracious reader and I could never understand why comics were of any less merit or importance than any other way of writing. I think the thing that keeps me with comics is there's still so much to be done. There's still this huge unplowed field, this huge unexplored wilderness, and as long as I can keep doing new things and coming up with new things, I will.
I do think comics are a dying art form because newspapers are a dying medium. But it's not to say that in the next generation, where there's people getting their news electronically, comics won't survive. Right now, they're still largely attached to the newspaper world. And the more they can break away from that, the more they have a chance to live on.
Certainly I enjoy the outré and I enjoy artistic comics and surrealism in comics very much. But the decision I made and have stuck with and refined was the decision to try to be funny and communicate humor. Once you put that ahead of everything else, it resolves those other questions for you.
Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.
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